Blog Assignment: How SNA could help to identify corrupt police officers in Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro (“Rio”) is the second largest city in Brazil, the sixth largest city in the Americas and the world’s thirty-fourth largest city by population. Rio has approximately 6.5 million habitants and it is nicknamed “the Marvelous City”.

 

However, during many years, Rio has been suffering with the police corruption, that I can assume one of the major social problem in the current days. According to the National Victimization Survey, commissioned by the Ministry of Justice and the United Nation Program for Development, the police officers in Rio are the most corrupt in Brazil.

Can you imagine, people who are trained and paid to protect the integrity of the population, could be the same people that steal and sometimes kill you? Of course I cannot assume the majority of them are corrupt, but it is unacceptable due the relevance of the role that the police officers represent for the society regarding to preserve the security of the population. I also believe they embark in the life of crime for the same reason as the drug traffickers: poor education, lack of money, and lack of vision for the future.

         

Pictures of police officers receiving bribes in Rio

I strong believe with the utilization of the social network analysis tool (UCINET), agencies of security can identify more easily those corrupt police officers and arrest all of them.

What data should be important to start the analysis?   

I think the agencies of security should start to collect all the information about recent police officers arrested, such as:

·         Gender

·         Age

·         Degree of education

·         How many years working as police officer

·         Where do they live

·         Marriage, single or divorced

·         If they have kids

·         If they have any case of corruption before? If yes what kind?

·         Where did they committed the crime

·         They have relationship with drug gangs

·         And many more.

With all data collected, agencies of security should use the UCINET system in order to analyze the profile of this officers, the types of networks (directed/undirected ties, one mode vs two mode ties) do they have with other officers as well as drug gangs, parents and so on. However, it is necessary to measure the most important network connections by using the centrality metrics. So, UCINET also can help to identify:

a)      Density: The number of actual connections and the number of potential ones. This is a good measure to identify how large could be the actual connections with this police officers, such as, drug gangs, politician, citizen and prisoners.

b)      Degree: In or Out-degree. This will help to identify the node linked with the officers and also nodes that the officers are linked.

c)       Eigenvector: This will help to identify the most important/influential nodes connected with those police officers. So, with the most powerful nodes identified, this definitely facilitate the strategy of prioritization. And complementing the analysis, the use of Betweenness measure can also help to identify the distance of the most important nodes.    

 

 

Therefore, using the UCINET system in order to finding out all the important connection and going in depth in the details of those connections as I mentioned above, agencies of security could act more proactive to seek other corrupt police officers who have strong relation with those corrupt police officers using in the data as well as their other relatives (family, prisoners, friends and so on).  

I love Rio, it is the city that I was born as well as all my family. I strong believe with the power of the Social Network Analysis, it could help the issue of the identification those corrupt police officers and all important connections do they have. Thus, more criminals would be arrested.

Raphael Di Napoli – Hult International Business School